Generally described, there are a number of portable computing devices, such as digital still cameras, digital video cameras, media players, mobile phones, mobile computing devices, personal digital assistants, and the like that maintain data on a storage media, such as a portable storage media. The continued development of more complex portable computing devices and larger storage capacity portable storage media places a greater demand for flexibility on the file system format used on the storage media. Current file system format approaches can become deficient in that they do not provide adequate flexibility for increasing storage size capacities and/or storage media applications.
In one embodiment, extensible file systems may be utilized in these embodiments to allow for increased storage size capacities and application to storage media application. In one embodiment of an extensible file system, data may be stored in allocated clusters within a file system. As the amount of data increases, the number of allocated clusters may also increase. Accordingly, in these embodiments, each new allocated cluster would likely be added as a new entry in the file system, such as an additional entry in a file allocation table. The additional allocation and management of each separate cluster in an allocation can become inefficient for file system management.